Elizabeth Holmes spent years convincing investors, journalists, and powerful men that she could revolutionize medicine. Nathan Fielder built a career convincing real people to participate in experiments where we are never quite sure where truth ends and performance begins. Putting the two of them in front of a camera could never result in a conventional documentary.

The question posed by You Can See Everything is not simply whether Holmes is still lying. It is about figuring out who is manipulating whom.

Who Is Elizabeth Holmes?

Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford and founded Theranos with the promise of performing hundreds of medical tests using a single drop of blood. Young, blonde, dressed in a black turtleneck copied from Steve Jobs, and speaking in a strangely deep voice, she was presented as the future of Silicon Valley. At one point, her company was valued at approximately $9 billion.

The problem was both simple and extremely serious: the technology did not work as promised. After the fraud was exposed, Theranos collapsed, Holmes went on trial, and, in 2022, she was convicted of defrauding investors. In May 2023, she began serving a federal prison sentence of more than 11 years in Texas.

Her story had already become a cultural phenomenon. In 2019, the HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, directed by Alex Gibney, helped introduce the case to a wider audience. Around the same time, the investigative podcast The Dropout, hosted by journalist Rebecca Jarvis, reconstructed the rise and fall of Theranos and later followed Holmes’ trial.

In 2022, while the world was still dealing with the impact of the pandemic, Amanda Seyfried played Holmes in the miniseries The Dropout. The actress reproduced the voice, the fixed stare, and the calculated gestures, won an Emmy, and intensified the fascination surrounding a question that remains unanswered: Who is the real Elizabeth Holmes when she is not playing Elizabeth Holmes?

And Who Is Nathan Fielder?

Nathan Fielder is precisely the worst — or perhaps the best — person in front of whom anyone might attempt to control a narrative. In Nathan for You, he proposed absurdly elaborate solutions to save small businesses. In The Rehearsal, he recreated homes, restaurants, and entire situations so that ordinary people could rehearse important conversations and decisions before living through them.

His humor is born from discomfort, silence, and doubt. Fielder plays a version of himself so impassive that we cannot always tell whether he has lost control of the experiment or whether the resulting awkwardness was part of the plan from the beginning.

In You Can See Everything, co-directed with Lance Oppenheim, he meets a worthy opponent.

Where Did the Documentary Come From?

The project began 34 days before Holmes entered prison. She and her partner, Billy Evans, were looking for filmmakers willing to document her final days of freedom. They chose Fielder because they considered him, like themselves, an “unconventional thinker.”

Perhaps they imagined that they could use him to introduce a different Elizabeth Holmes: not the fraudster with the black turtleneck and deep voice, but the mother of two young children, separated from them by a conviction she still considers unjust.

Fielder and Oppenheim received extraordinary access to the couple’s home, Holmes’ parents, the children, and their private conversations. The project was kept secret for three years and unveiled in a surprise screening at the Telluride Film Festival. Cellphones were confiscated to prevent leaks. When it ended, critics emerged describing the film as hypnotic, disturbing, hilarious, absurd, and unlike any documentary they had ever seen.

The reaction is not merely about Holmes’ presence. It comes from the suspicion that her attempt to rehabilitate her image slowly becomes something else entirely.

What Appears to Happen? Spoilers From This Point On

At first, the camera almost succeeds in generating compassion. Holmes is about to leave her children and appears determined to make the most of her final days with her family. Gradually, however, the façade begins to crack.

In one of the most discussed scenes, Fielder shows her the classic Abbott and Costello routine, Who’s on First? Holmes claims never to have seen it, does not understand why it is funny, and still fails to grasp the joke after it is explained. Is her reaction genuine, or is it another performance calculated for the camera? Even Fielder seems unsure.

Billy then explains that his partner is “weird,” processes things differently, and that this is one of the reasons he considers her brilliant. It is also one of the first indications that the documentary may not be solely about Holmes.

She even watches scenes from The Dropout. She becomes irritated by a sequence in which the Theranos machine breaks down in front of employees, insisting that it never happened. In another moment, she is emotionally shaken while watching Sunny Balwani, her former partner and Theranos executive, prepare the fictional Holmes for a meeting with investors.

The most revealing conversation occurs when Fielder asks whether the Theranos machine actually worked. Holmes argues that its patent and underlying concept were valid, retreating into a semantic dispute to avoid admitting the essential truth: the device built by the company did not do what she had promised.

But the greatest surprise may be Billy Evans. According to critics, he occupies more and more space, attempts to direct the conversations, and becomes an intrusive and increasingly unstable presence. As Holmes prepared to enter prison, the couple were still making calls in search of investors for a new biotech startup based on rapid disease testing. Yes, something uncomfortably similar to Theranos.

After Holmes enters prison, the film continues to follow Billy and the attempts to communicate with her. What began as a portrait of a convicted woman’s final days of freedom starts observing a man apparently determined to control the company, his partner’s public image, and the documentary itself.

There is also an appearance that the directors asked critics not to reveal. We only know that it is a familiar face connected to Holmes’ world. Those who have seen the film describe the moment as jaw-dropping and insist that the surprise should be preserved.

Who Is Manipulating Whom?

Holmes appears to believe that she invited the cameras in to reclaim authorship of her own story. Billy seems to imagine that he can turn the film into an image-rehabilitation campaign and perhaps even a showcase for a new business. Fielder watches it all with his usual expressionless face, although he admits that he still does not fully understand what he witnessed.

That is the great fascination of You Can See Everything. Elizabeth Holmes has spent her life creating characters: the child prodigy, the successor to Steve Jobs, the medical revolutionary, the wronged entrepreneur, and now the mother separated from her children. Nathan Fielder, meanwhile, works by exposing the moment when reality and performance become inseparable.

Perhaps he is the only man capable of beating her because he does not try to force a confession. He simply allows Elizabeth Holmes to keep talking — and lets her construct her next invention in front of the camera: Elizabeth Holmes.